Monday, January 12, 2015

The worrying rise of radical Islam in the West

The recent attack on the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo (cf. my Ethical Musings' post
on the subject) is indicative of a growing problem in both European nations and
the United States. Radical Islam is on the rise among Muslims citizens.

The most common explanations point either to the teachings
of Islam or to the influence of radical Islamist groups such as al Qaeda. Both
of those explanations have just enough substance to be half-truths that mislead
and deflect attention from the real problem.

Islam is a religion of peace that teaches tolerance. His
contemporaries repeatedly subjected the prophet Mohammed to ridicule and abuse.
Yet he never condemned those critics nor did he attempt to punish them. Indeed,
the Koran (unlike the Jewish and Christian scriptures!) does not include any
punishment for blasphemy. Hadiths (the compilation of sayings, actions, and traditions
that are associated with Mohammed) do condemn blasphemy and provide the basis for
laws in many Islamic nations (e.g., Saudi Arabia and Pakistan) against ridiculing
the prophet and blasphemy. Illustratively, Saudi
Arabia this week sentenced a liberal blogger to 1000 lashes and 10 years in
prison for criticizing that state's version of Islam.

In sum, an extreme interpretation of the Hadiths has contributed
to engendering an extreme intolerance among radical Islamists. In the wake of
the Charlie Hebdo attack, the leader of
at least one Islamist group, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah of Lebanon's Hezbollah has
declared
that the attackers have insulted Islam and the Mohammed more than did the
satirical cartoons.

The problem with half-truths is that they contain some
truth. One can interpret the Koran, as can be done with any religious
scripture, in many ways; some of those interpretations will strongly support
violent acts, even though the preponderance of adherents strongly decries both
the interpretation and the violence. If that were the whole story, then
religiously motivated violence by Muslims would remain as sporadic as it is
among Christians, Jews, Buddhists, and others.

Similarly, al Qaeda and other radical Islamist groups do
exert some influence in their local areas of operation and among Western
Muslims. If that were the whole story, then those groups would exert no more influence
than does a radical group such as the Christian anti-abortion terror group, Operation
Rescue. France has a population of 66 million. Approximately 1000 of them – about
0.0015%, or 1 in 66,000 people – has gone to Syria to fight with one of the
Islamists groups there. Analyses of historical patterns of fighters returning home
from Afghanistan and elsewhere suggest that fewer than 10% of the 1000 are
likely to return to France to continue jihad there (for details analysis, cf. the
conclusion of my book, Just Counterterrorism).
In other words, the much-hyped threat that the influence of foreign groups poses
an existential threat is another half-truth, i.e., has just enough substance to
be credible but actually misconstrues the real problem.

The larger cause of Westerners becoming Islamic extremists
is Western intolerance toward, and lack of respect for, immigrants who happen
to be Muslims. Secular France is notorious for its haughty unacceptance of
strangers, an attitude heightened when the immigrants are people of color who
are neither secular nor Christian. Similar dynamics are operative, though
perhaps more subtly, in the United States and other European nations.

Most immigrants leave their country of origin hoping to make
a new life for themselves in their adopted country, finding there a security
and prosperity impossible in their country of origin. The full integration of
immigrants into the receiving country's population can often require several
generations and rarely is easy. However, when integration occurs at a glacial
pace, and when the host nation and its people not only fail to respect
immigrants but view them as either a source of low cost labor or parasites,
then resentment develops among the immigrants' grandchildren and
great-grandchildren (and occasionally the children).

In Islam, unlike some other religious traditions, economic
and political discontent has a long history of finding its most effective
expression in religious language. That is, people frame their protests in terms
of how the state (or other forces of oppression) is violating Islam's teachings.
From this perspective, the attack on Charlie
Hebdo for blasphemy is really a protest – albeit an unethical one because
of the violence and killing – against France's lack of respect for immigrants
who happen to be Muslim. Violent attacks of this type will increase and further
polarize populations until we address its root cause – the widespread lack of
respect and equal opportunity that many European and US immigrants routinely experience.

1 comment:

This article (which a reader called to my sttention) - http://www.firstthings.com/article/2015/01/challenging-radical-islam - in first things provies a good description of the various schools of Islamic thought and their relationship to extreme Islam.